Further to my previous post about polar bears being used to backdoor Kyoto regulations, please see this Jonathan Alder post that reveals just how effectively NEPA is employed in derailing seemingly harmless activities with very little effort:
Yesterday the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California overturned the USDA’s 2005 decision to deregulate “Roundup Ready” alfalfa, barred new sales of seed, and barred any additional planting of already-bought seeds effective March 30. According to the court, the Agriculture Department had failed to conduct an environmental impact statement (EIS) as required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The court’s decision does not mean that plaintiffs demonstrated “Roundup Ready” alfalfa necessarily poses any particular environmental threat. All that was required for plaintiffs to prevail under NEPA is that there was a potentially significant environmental impact that the agency failed to consider. Nor does the decision mean that the risks posed by “Roundup Ready” alfalfa outweigh its environmental and consumer benefits. NEPA simply required that the USDA adequately examine this question before making its decision.
As I mentioned in the comments to my previous post, NEPA is a powerful tool that has been ruthlessly and effectively exploited by particular activists to prevent any activity that it does not like. NEPA has even been used in attempts to stifle competition in what should be regarded as wholly commercial activities. Regardless of who is harmed by such prevention, and irrespective of the benefits that such activity may bring, a small minority of motivated activists are fully capable of tying up any project in legal knots with little to no effort.
In the “Roundup Ready” case above, an onerous and costly EIS was not prepared and now the government (as well as those farmers who bought or were paid for the harvest from such seeds) will have to put a hold on all related activities while it goes back and does one. There is a short-cut approach to the EIS called an “environmental assessment” which essentially says that an in depth study is not necessary, but that option (if it was not taken prior to the litigation) is off the table now. Instead, the government will have to gather studies, issue reports, assemble a Draft EIS (“DEIS”), take public comments, respond to public comments, etc., etc., etc., until the requirements of NEPA, as interpreted by the court, are met. Any missteps along the way (and there will undoubtedly be some) will result in further litigation that delays the ultimate end of planting and harvesting these allegedly foul seeds.
Meanwhile, the farmers are left to rot. To be sure, they will be collecting insurance payments on the failed crops, and they will be suing the USDA for failing to take the necessary steps to make sure that “Roundup Ready” alfalfa seeds could be planted. But many of these farmers will also fall even further behind on equipment leases and tax payments, some of them falling into bankruptcy or selling the farm to (barely) get out of debt. And guess who foots the bill for all of this. That’s right, the U.S. taxpayers.
Not only will Joe and Jenny Taxpayer be paying for the government to complete the EIS, they will be paying the farmers insurance awards, and they will be paying the farmers legal damages, not to mention paying for the costs of government attorneys attending to all of this litigation. Moreover, Joe and Jenny may also be on the hook for the activists attorney’s fees thanks to rules that allow successful parties to recover such when suing under particular statutes (e.g. Google “substantially prevailing party”).
In the end, the Taxpayers are out a whole lot of money, the farmers are in relatively dire straits, no one is getting the benefits of “Roundup Ready” alfalfa, and the environmental activists who started all of this won’t be out-of-pocket one red cent.
Only in America …
[tags] NEPA, “Roundup Ready” alfalfa, environmentalism, EIS, USDA [/tags]